During the course of producing a media project, such as a film or a musical performance, the contributing media assets may be converted into a number of different formats that are adapted to particular purposes. For example, source video captured by a camera at high resolution may be converted into a compressed form suitable for use in a video editing system, or for streaming to a portable device. Such heterogeneous implementations of the same content are often stored in different asset management systems, and are processed independently and with very different algorithms that are tied to the type of the asset management systems that host the various implementations. Thus, separate steps must be performed by a user to retrieve or play back each implementation, even if their content is the same.
The different ways in which such assets are handled is also manifested in the methods the systems deploy to find media essence for a given asset. Each system typically has its own, unique method for mapping assets to their corresponding essence files.
There is a need to streamline the processing of media assets during the media production pipeline.